Yesterday’s News

1924

Professor of dramatic literature George P. Baker, founder of the “47 Workshop” and instructor in playwriting and production at Harvard, resigns to direct Yale’s new Department of Dramatic Art, following a $1-million gift to Yale from E.S. Harkness to be used in part to build a theater for the production of plays written by members of Baker’s department. An unhappy alumnus writes the Bulletin, “Losing Professor Baker and the Yale game in the same week is a little too much to stand.”

1939

In an apparent first for the Stadium, a drum majorette—Beatrice Fishman of New Hampshire University—appears in the halftime parade during a Harvard football game. In addition, after New Hampshire’s 11 female cheerleaders call on Crimson fans for “a regular Harvard cheer,” old-timers report “they had never heard such enthusiastic cheering from a Harvard crowd.”

1954

A Committee on Visual Arts, to examine the place of art in the teaching of Harvard College and the Harvard graduate schools, has been designated by the president to find ways of putting Harvard resources in the fine arts to most fruitful use.

1959

Harvard’s new chemistry laboratory, boasting 21,000 square feet of workspace, is dedicated and named after president emeritus James Bryant Conant. President Pusey thanks the federal government for paying half the building’s cost and suggests this betokens an era when “we will work together more closely.”

1984

Bishop Desmond M. Tutu, LL.D. ’79, visits briefly, sponsored by the Harvard Foundation. “I can’t say, ‘Hey, I support divestment,’ because that would be an indictable offense back in South Africa,” he says during a press conference. “But I will certainly say that I expect those who want to support us…to exert all the pressure they can on the South African government—political, diplomatic, and above all economic pressure.”

1989

At halftime during The Game, former clarinet student Derek Bok tootles the opening bars of Rhapsody in Blue. “The instrument was thrust upon me,” Harvard’s president reports. “The reed was in desperate condition, but the selection seemed appropriate. They had the blue and we had the rhapsody.”